So we got our game (Volgarr the Viking) finally ported to our first console - XBox One (mostly because they gave us dev kits for free), and to our surprise they selected us to be the Games with Gold game for November. And now that people are playing it, I've noticed something interesting - we are getting a LOT more "hate" posts than we did with the original Steam release (getting praise too of course, but the ratio of hate to praise is much stronger in the hate direction this time).
I've been pondering why this is, and this is some possible reasons I've come up with so far:
1) Perceived value from price point. One of the important yet counter-intuitive lessons I learned about marketing and economics, is that selling your product for cheaper does NOT always mean you will sell more copies. Research has shown that having too low a price point can actually reduce number of sales, as well as of course making you less money per sale.
The reason? Again, perceived value of the product. Price it too cheap, and you miss a demographic that automatically considers it not worth their time as it must be a crappy product. That's why sales and coupons are so effective - you keep the perceived value high because of the base price, yet allow people that aren't willing to pay that much an opportunity to buy the game and feel they are getting a good deal for just a little more effort on their part (getting the coupon, waiting for the sale, etc). Surprisingly many people won't bother with a sale or coupon, because its not worth the effort to them to save a few bucks. In this way you hit multiple "price points" at once and keep your perceived value decently high.
Giving a game away for free at its introduction to a new market makes its perceived value automatically pretty low, so people are going to look for justifications for why the product is "bad enough" that it would be given away for nothing.
2) Knowing what you are buying. Most people will do a minimal amount of checking at least to see if a game is something that would interest them before they purchase it. Thus they know what to expect. When its free, however, a large number of people are going to play the game with no idea what they are getting. We were careful in all of Volgarr's marketing to let people know what kind of game they were getting. Its a very tough, but fair, old-school game design. Not just old-school nostalgic aesthetics as you often see, but old-school design with things like fixed trajectory jumps and a delay on your attack swing and very infrequent checkpoints. Now that its free though, people are playing it without having any idea what kind of game it is and likely would never have bought it, thus an increase in negative reaction from all the people the game was clearly not meant to appeal to.
3) Buyer's bias. When you pay money for something, you tend to want to justify the purchase for yourself. You will put extra effort into finding things you like about your purchase, and try to discount the things you don't like, so you can feel you made the right decision - especially if it can't be easily returned. This is what leads to fanboyism and the "console wars" - people trying to justify their purchase decision by claiming the product they bought is better and the competitive product is worse. Again with the game being free, there's no reason to try to justify the purchase to yourself, so you aren't looking for what you enjoy from it, and won't spend as long learning what makes the game special. Human nature takes over and you end up bothered by every little thing you perceive as wrong with the game (humans naturally have negative emotions stick in their memory more than positive ones) and decide its terrible with little time put into it.
4) Audience (nothing to do with it being free after all?). XBox One is still fairly new and mostly bought by early adopters while everyone else waits to see how the XB1 vs PS4 debate pans out, and it hasn't featured a whole ton of retro indie games thus far. It is of course being advertised as bleeding-edge technology designed for new high-demand AAA titles that its predecessor couldn't handle. Thus the people that are likely to own one are mostly going to be looking for new, high end experiences they couldn't get on the 360, and aren't likely to really dig an old-school style game that looks like it could run on an SNES let alone a 360. Contrast with Steam, which has become one of the primary sources for indie games in the last several years and has a large audience of indie and old-school-loving gamers that don't feel the platform really has anything to prove. Thus the XB1 audience is quite a bit more likely to hate on a game like this compared to the Steam audience, even if it is (sorta) free.
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Anyone have any alternate theories?
Fortunately, the negativity isn't really bothering me. I'm pretty thick-skinned anyway, and I intentionally targeted a very niche audience and ignored suggestions to change the game to appeal a broader audience whenever it would be at the expense of the enjoyment from my primary target demographic. I actually expected more of this kind of thing than we got back at the Steam release. In fact, because it IS essentially free I find many of the hate responses to just be amusing more than anything, since this time around I don't have to feel guilty about taking a customers money when they didn't like the game (if it were up to me I'd issue a refund to anyone who didn't like the game, no questions asked, but its more up to the distributors).
Therefore I'm not posting this looking for any kind of sympathy, I'm really just interested in what would cause the discrepancy as a thought experiment, and also figured some of you others considering a program like this and reading this post might be better prepared for what kind of public reaction you might get.
